Hasti Jafari is a playwright, theater-maker and educator originally from Iran. They enjoy making playgrounds through experimental storytelling as a way to bring elephants, whales, flying vacuum cleaners, and other creatures of imagination into the room. Jafari is a theater graduate from the University of Tehran and recently finished an MFA in playwriting at San Francisco State University, where they also taught Creative Writing. They are a recipient of the Marcus Recruitment Award, an honorable mention at the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival Program, and a winner of Mozaik Philanthropy’s 2024 Future Art Writers Award.

A human and women’s rights activist, Vida Movahed was born in 1985 in Tehran. She gained international recognition in December of 2017, when she took a public stand against Iran’s compulsory hijab law. During a street protest, she climbed atop a utility box, tied her hijab to a stick, and waved it high above her head for an hour. Although she was arrested and held in police custody for a month, her action inspired a new movement of women called the “Girls of Enghelab (Revolution) Street.” Several other women repeated the same defiant act over the following months and hundreds have been arrested since. In 2018, Movahed repeated her protest, this time climbing atop the turquoise dome in Enghelab Square. Again, she was immediately arrested and served eight months of a year-long prison sentence. While the hijab law remains in effect, Movahed brought the world’s attention to this discriminatory law, and her actions have provided inspiration and strength to many Iranian women who have continued to protest. As a result, over half of the Iranian population would like to see the law overturned, and younger Iranian women have pushed its boundaries, adopting a more casual approach to the hijab and to their mode of dress in general.